Survivors of Buchenwald Concentration
Camp

The famous photo above was taken inside Buchenwald Barrack #56 by Private H. Miller of the Civil Affairs Branch of the U. S. Army Signal Corps on April 16, 1945, five days after the Buchenwald camp was liberated by the Sixth Armored Division of the US Third Army on April 11, 1945. This photo was published by the New York Times on May 6, 1945 with the caption "Crowded Bunks in the Prison Camp at Buchenwald." Block #56 was an adult barrack in the "Small Camp" at Buchenwald.

Miklos Grüner (Nikolaus Gruner)
has identified himself as the 16-year-old boy shown in the bottom
left-hand corner of the photo above; although Grüner says
he was suffering from tuberculosis and near death, he was not
in the hospital barrack for TB patients. In May 1944, at the
age of 15, Grüner was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau where he was registered
and then transferred to the Monowitz camp to work in the I.G. Farben
factories. When Auschwitz-Birkenau was evacuated on January 18,
1945, Grüner was taken to Buchenwald.

Elie Wiesel has identified himself as
the prisoner at the end of the second tier of bunks from the
bottom. His is the last full face that you see, encircled in
red, to the left of a post in the photo below. Born on September
30, 1928, Elie was 15 and a half when he was sent on a transport
from Hungary to Auschwitz-Birkenau in May 1944, and then transferred
to Monowitz to work.

The face of 16-year-old Elie Wiesel is circled in red

The photo below is a close-up of the right side of the photo above. The face of 16-year-old Elie Wiesel can be seen in the bottom row to the left of the post in the center of the photo.

Close-up of Buchenwald
photo shows Elie Wiesel

Orphan boys leaving Buchenwald camp, April 27, 1945

The photo above shows a group of orphan boys walking out of the Buchenwald camp on April 27, 1945.

In his book entitled "Night,"
Elie wrote that he became sick three days after the camp was
liberated on April 11, 1945 and was in the hospital for two weeks.

In a book entitled "The Children
of Buchenwald" by Judith Hemmendinger and Robert Krell,
there are the stories of 31 of the orphan boys at Buchenwald,
including the story of Elie Wiesel in Chapter 11.

On page 54 of the book is this footnote:

Romek and Abram in Block 8 were unaware
that Block 66 held the children at liberation. They thought themselves
the only two children in Buchenwald.

The authors also mention on page 113
that Block 66 was the barrack for the orphan boys at Buchenwald.

On this web
site, Jewish professor Ken Walzer is quoted as follows, regarding
the orphans at Buchenwald:

Among the older boys was Eliezer Wiesel
from Sighet, Rumania, who was protected in block 66 with hundreds
of others.

According to a news article published
in October 2008 on the Sun Times News Group web site, Paul Argiewicz has identified himself
as the 16-year-old prisoner in the third tier of bunk beds, to
the left of a post in the center of the photo shown below.

Paul Argiewicz is the
prisoner in the circle

According to the Sun Times article, written
by Wynn Koebel Foster, Argiewicz was one of only 300,000 survivors
out of a population of 3,300,000 Polish Jews. Like Elie Wiesel,
Argiewicz was a teenager who was brought from Auschwitz-Birkenau
to Buchenwald when the camp closed in January 1945, and both
were orphans in the Buchenwald "Small Camp." Argiewicz
had lied about his age during the selection at Birkenau, claiming
that he was 18 years old and experienced as an electrician so
that he would be selected for work, when he was actually under
15 years of age and was destined to die in the gas chamber. Argiewicz
told Foster of the Sun Times that he had the added advantage
of being able to speak fluent German "with a Bavarian accent."
(Germans in Bavaria speak a dialect called Bayerisch.)

Shortly after the war ended, a traveling
exhibit of huge photographs from the Nazi concentration camps,
including Buchenwald, was first shown in St. Louis, MO and then
taken to Washington, DC. The photograph below shows visitors
looking at the most famous photo taken at Buchenwald.